Brothers reflect on first, last All-Star games at Yankee Stadium

The two brothers got up at 6 a.m. to catch an elevated train from Queens, then later transferred to the subway.

They were 17 and 14 and their grandmother didn't understand why they had to leave so early, but they wanted to make sure they got tickets. When they got to Yankee Stadium, Bob Wohltjen and his brother, Howard, paid $1.10 for admission to the 1939 All-Star Game, the first at Yankee Stadium and only the seventh all-time.

That was double the usual price for bleacher seats.

The scorecard was a nickel - pencil included, Bob points out. Hot dogs were a dime, a Pepsi another nickel.

"There was a tune they used," recalled Wohltjen, now 86, on Monday.

Pepsi Cola hits the spot
12 full ounces, that's a lot
Twice as much, for a nickel, too
You know Pepsi is the thing for you!

Wohltjen, who moved from New York to Ann Arbor in the 1960s for a job with Hoover Ball and Bearing, will be watching again tonight, when the 82nd Major League All-Star Game returns, for a final time, to the same stadium he sat in back in 1939.

And it seems safe to say there won't be too many 17- and 14-year-old brothers riding the subway home alone afterward.

"Things were a lot different in those days - there wasn't any fear," Wohltjen said when the subway was brought up. "We would go to New York City on a Saturday, a couple of friends of mine, and we'd spend the day. We used to write for tickets to different radio broadcasts and go to those. They were free. I grew up in a great time."

The All-Star game was a lot different as well.

The eight position players for the American League - including Joe DiMaggio, Hank Greenberg, Bill Dickey and Joe Cronin - played all nine innings in a 3-1 victory over the National League. Both managers used just three pitchers.

Lou Gehrig - who had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) just a few weeks earlier - was named to the team as an injury replacement and did not play.
Perhaps most amazingly by today's standards, the game was over in less than two hours.

Bob Feller was a rookie and closed out the win with 32⁄3 innings of one-hit relief.
Wohltjen admits his memories of the game are limited.

"The one big thing I can remember was Bob Feller pitching, coming in in relief," Wohltjen said. "He struck out the first batter, I can't remember who, and then closed out the game. The American League won, I think the score was 3-1."

Wohltjen, retired since 1979, saw all three New York teams of that era - the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers - play, but ended up a St. Louis Cardinals fan, at least in part because his father and brother were Dodgers fans.

"I'm still a Cardinals fan," Wohltjen said. "They had a great bunch of players in those days - Frankie Frisch and the Deans, Dizzie and Daffy. And they had a great competition with the Brooklyn Dodgers.

"We took my sister to a game, a doubleheader between the Dodgers and the Cardinals. She sat between us and when we got home, she told my mother it was a good thing each team won," he added, laughing.

Talking about the changes he's seen, Wohltjen singles out free agency and television as some of the biggest.

In the 1930s and 1940s, you didn't see an out-of-town team unless you saw them in person, and there was a different kind of familiarity built between fans and their teams when players tended to spend their entire career with a single franchise.

He misses the double-headers.

But Wohltjen doesn't get lost reminiscing for the past. He still loves the game for what it is, embracing Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols as his favor player and catching St. Louis on television whenever he can.

It made for fun times back in 2004, or at least fun times for his little brother Howard, who now lives in Maine and has become a Red Sox fan.

"There was riding," Wohltjen said, laughing, "as brothers will do, even though we're up there in years. We still talk a lot on the phone."

Read more from Jim Carty at blog.mlive.com/jim_carty. He can be reached at 734-994-6815 or jcarty@annarbornews.com.